Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity. Patrick Curry

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СКАЧАТЬ our purposes here, however, the point is the way biography can transmute, through art, into contemporary relevance. For Tolkien’s deep dislike of the Norman virtues of bureaucracy, efficiency and rationalization, as it manifests itself in The Lord of the Rings, provides the contemporary reader with an instant ‘recognition’ of the global modernization which the Normans, as it happens, anticipated in these important respects.

      But Englishness is not inscribed in the text. This is something I finally realized after talking to Russian and Irish and Italian readers, and discovering that each one had found in the hobbits an accessible native tradition, centred on a ‘small,’ simple and rural people – and self – with which to begin, and end renewed.

      I am not just talking about long-vanished peasants, either. I know one man living within a few minutes of both the diabolical London motorway ring-road and Heathrow Airport whom Farmer Maggot could have been modelled on: ‘There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open.’ Of course, he was living there before these monstrosities appeared; but they haven’t driven him out. Such people in such places may have gone to ground, but they’re still around, and there are even some younger ones coming up. As the Donga ‘tribe’ (named after the ancient trackways on Twyford Down, Hampshire) sing, ‘We are the old people, we are the new people, we are the same people, stronger than before.’

      Nor are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ethnocentrically limited to northwestern Europe – even though the qualities of their peoples, lands, seasons, the very air belong to that part of the world. The reason is another of Tolkien’s master-strokes. The anthropologist Virginia Luling has pointed out that he presents us with a northwestern Europe, the home and heartland of the industrial revolution, as a place where it has never happened; and by the same token, with the birthplace of colonialism and imperialism as an unstained ‘Fourth World’ of indigenous tribes. Accordingly, the cultures of Middle-earth’s peoples are pre-modern or ‘traditional,’ and indeed pre-Christian, while their religions and mythologies are animist, polytheist and shamanist. But Tolkien’s choice of a ‘Norse’ mythology for his tale as a whole, over the usual Graeco-Roman one, situates his story still more precisely. (It also effectively bypasses all the élite critical apparatus of Greek and Latin references which many ordinary readers might find either boring or alienating.)

      In fact, the only place in Middle-earth which is industrial, imperialistic, and possessed of an all-powerful state is Mordor – admittedly the most powerful force of all, as such, but essentially an alien invader (as Sauron originally was) rather than a native. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is thus a Europe, as Luling puts it, that has never been ‘Europeanized,’ or, what amounts to the same thing, ‘modernized.’ And the story of The Lord of the Rings – as reflected in its very title – is about the resistance to just that. The potential relevance of these books consequently opens out not only to anyone living in ‘the West,’ but to anyone affected by it; which is to say, nearly everyone anywhere.

A Great Book?

      We shall also consider The Lord of the Rings as literature. That involves considering why Tolkien chose ‘fantasy,’ with its affinities with fairy-tale and myth, as the appropriate form and strategy; and why the wisdom of that choice has been so roundly confirmed by readers, although ignored or condemned by critics. There is also the question of comparable books. I shall suggest that there are indeed a few other works of literary myth, or ‘mythopoeic’ fiction, which also reveal its true power, feed the soul, and escape the modernist critical compass. There are others, also apparently ‘fantasy,’ which are completely different. Here I am obliged to be unkind to some sacred cows: from the pernicious productions of The Walt Disney Company, and pseudo-fairy-tales like The Wizard of Oz, to some of the authors and critics now canonized by literary feminism.

      Given how unavoidably subjective and personal it must be, compiling lists of ‘great’ books is a game we can all play. I have no doubt that The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, even if not always for purely ‘literary’ reasons. But I am not too concerned to persuade the reader to agree; just to realize that it is fully deserving of affection and respect, and even some passionate attention. Written with love, learning, skill and sacrifice, it is a cry (as someone once said of religion) from ‘the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions,’ but also something more. It offers not an ‘escape’ from our world, this world, but hope for its future.

       · 2 · THE SHIRE: CULTURE, SOCIETY AND POLITICS

       It is as neighbours, full of ineradicable prejudices, that we must love each other, and not as fortuitously ‘separated brethren.’

      Hobbits, according to Tolkien, were more frequent ‘long ago in the quiet of the world …’ They ‘love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom … Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking.’ They thought of themselves as ‘plain quiet folk’ with ‘no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!’ ‘Nonetheless,’ their chronicler notes, ‘ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill …’ In other words, they manifested ‘the notorious Anglo-hobbitic inability to know when they’re beaten.’

      Hobbits were also inclined ‘to joke about serious things,’ and ‘say less than they mean.’ Indeed, they ‘will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.’ Similarly, they preferred speeches that were ‘short and obvious,’ and ‘liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.’ They were ‘a bit suspicious … of anything out of the way – uncanny, if you understand me.’ It wasn’t difficult to acquire a reputation for peculiarity in the Shire.

      But as Tolkien notes, in addition to their wealth ‘Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional, as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with Elves.’ The nephew of ‘mad Baggins,’ as he eventually became known, Frodo was something of an aesthete and intellectual, who, ‘to the amazement of sensible folk … was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight.’ None of this was usual among their peers, and Sam the gardener, although recently and exceptionally lettered, was a more typical hobbit than his fellow Companions – or as Tolkien put it, ‘the genuine hobbit.’

      Like some readers, Tolkien himself sometimes found Sam, as he wrote:

      very ‘trying.’ He СКАЧАТЬ